BUFFALO, N.Y. – Carole Emberton, assistant professor of
history at the University at Buffalo, is the recipient of the
Richards Prize for the best article published in the 2012 edition
of the Journal of the Civil War Era, the official journal of the
Society of Civil War
Historians.

The prize is presented by the George and Ann Richards Civil War
Era Center, an initiative of the Penn State Department of History,
considered a unique resource for interpreting and reflecting upon
life in 19th-century America.

In presenting the award the selection committee praised
Emberton’s piece as “powerful, beautiful,
mind-expanding, almost philosophical…a model not merely of
Civil War scholarship but of what historians can do when they are
working at the top of their game.”

The winning essay, “Only Murder Makes Men: Reconsidering
the Black Military Experience,” is a detailed and gripping
exploration of how and why Civil War military service reconfigured
black masculinity from that of slave to that of a free man.

Emberton argues that while the experiences of nearly 200,000
black Union soldiers paved the way for important civil rights
reform, such as the passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave them
the right to vote, the process helped create a hyper-masculine
martial political culture that would have deadly consequences for
freed slaves in the Reconstruction South.

The essay’s title is taken from an observation by W.E.B.
Du Bois in his seminal study of emancipation: “The slave
pleaded, he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and
the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he
was a man…How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance
and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most
people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men.”

Journal editor William Blair says the award committee was
“unanimous and enthusiastic in its endorsement of Emberton's
article” and that the group repeated a frequently quoted
comment by Frederick Douglass: “Once let the black man get
upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his
button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket,
there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the
right to citizenship.”

“We all quote Douglass,” the committee wrote.
“We all unreflectively nod in assent. No one examines
how disturbing it is that we all so easily equate the sine qua non
of citizenship with committing murder in the name of the
state.”

“No one,” they said, “except Carole
Emberton.”

Emberton’s research focuses on the Civil War and
Reconstruction eras, and in particular, how the discourse of
emancipation became entangled with justifications for violence,
both during the war and after, and is echoed in today’s
heated debate on gun ownership.

Emberton’s current work traces how movements for social
reform in the 19th century, specifically anti-slavery and
Reconstruction-era efforts to remake the former Confederacy and
extend civil rights to freed people, co-mingled with violent
imperialist politics in the American West and abroad in the last
half of the century.

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